Public safety expert Leonard Matarese discusses how community policing data can transform Rockford

Saturday

May 17, 2014 at 5:00 PM

ROCKFORD — Leonard Matarese is a public safety expert and consultant with the International City/County Management Association.

Matarese has 43 years of experience as a law enforcement officer, police chief, public safety director, city manager and major city human resources commissioner, according to his ICMA biography.

Matarese has trained law enforcement professionals on the techniques of community policing philosophy over the last 20 years. He has conducted numerous studies of emergency services staffing levels, matching staffing needs with calls-for-service workload.

He answered questions posed by the Register Star:

What have cities done to successfully reduce crime?

Addressing any crime problem is partnering with the community. The police can’t solve the crime problems by themselves, and they have to have a very strong partnership with the community that involves a lot of communication, trust-building, a lot of sharing information and truly being partners in effort to reduce the crime rate. That’s the first step. There are a whole series of technical things that departments are doing around the country, but unless they have that partnership with the all community — and I don’t mean any one segment of the community but the entire community throughout all the neighborhoods — the partnerships with the educational community, partnerships with the business community, with the religious community, that’s the only way to get a grip on dealing with the crime problems. Police can’t solve the crime problem by themselves. They can’t arrest their way out of the problem. It has to be a real team effort on the part of government and the citizens.

You said, ‘You can’t arrest your way out of the crime problem.’ What did you mean by that?

If you continue to focus on the enforcement side and not on the prevention side, you just end up with more criminals to arrest. And then you arrest them and more criminals come up, and you arrest them. So the goal is to try to make a serious effort on the prevention side, on the proactive side of policing, where you are reaching out to hopefully prevent people from becoming involved in criminal activity.

What do cities with high crime rates have in common?

Poverty plays a big role in crime. We know that unemployed people, unemployed youth especially, have a propensity to become involved in crime. Poverty itself is part of that whole problem that has to be solved. That’s why the police can’t do this alone and why it has to be a broader community effort. ICMA was involved in the early stages of developing the community policing philosophy. We talk about it as community-oriented governance. That means that it’s not just the police who have to establish a relationship with the community, it’s also all other aspects of government. It’s the public works department, it’s the recreational department, it’s the fire department. So we see in communities that have been successful in dealing with crime problems, that the entire community, and that includes the other aspects of government, are involved in the process.

We recently visited Elgin, Illinois, where folks are proud of the impact their resident officer program has had in the community. Is that a good strategy?

A lot of cities have done that, but the difficulty, of course, is getting police officers and their families to move into neighborhoods that have a lot of problems. There are a limited number of officers who are interested, or are willing, to do that. When the community policing concept evolved in the early 1990s, we were really talking about getting back to the way we used to do policing, like when I got started in the 1970s and well before that. That is where the officers are an integral part of the community.

Our fundamental problem today, and in most cities, the officers, because they are in patrol cars and they are responding to radio calls, they are essentially faceless. The community doesn’t know them and they don’t know the community.

If you can get officers to live in parts of the community and become an integral part of the community, interacting with members of the community on a regular basis, that’s a giant step forward to addressing problems. They are going to see first-hand what some of the issues are that residents have to deal with, and, hopefully, they will work with the residents to solve those problems.

Do more police officers mean less crime?

No. Nobody has been ever able to establish that correlation. It’s really a question of what those police officers are doing. What kind of proactive activities are they involved in? What kind of techniques are they using? Some of the newer approaches with predictive policing is where you really utilize historical records to identify what is going to happen going forward, and are they focusing resources where the problems really are. The number of police officers is less important than what they do and how focused they are.

What are the primary factors researchers have found for why crime rates have fallen nationally since the 1990s?

Researchers have been able to identify all the variables. But some of that has certainly been attributed to smarter policing and using the resources in a more focused manner. I think using the kind of management tools, the Compstat approach, where you are closely watching what is going on, and you are quickly reactive instead of waiting for months and months to respond to potential problems. We have done a much better job in managing our law enforcement agencies. Certainly the community policing approach, that whole philosophy has had, I think, a big impact as well.